Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Submissive Education

In one of Maggie Anderson's interviews about the Empowerment Experiment (her effort to buy from black owned businesses for a year), she talks about how hard it is to find black owned businesses. She felt that, black people having been in this country for so long, it shouldn't be so hard to find black entrepreneurs.

Which got me thinking. Maybe it is in part because of being from this country that African Americans entrepreneurs are harder to find. Is our education and socialization system creating workers that obey rather than entrepreneurs that innovate?

When I was a kid, my father had a little office supply business. He used to leave the house every morning to go out and "make" a living. Today, you only hear people talk in terms of "earning" a living.

Education, as William Astore wrote in his article Selling Education, Manufacturing Technocrats, Torturing Souls: The Tyranny of Being Practical, has become about "a better job, higher salary, more marketable skills, and more impressive credentials."

Note the focus on others opinions. Focusing on "marketable skills" means finding out what some employer wants and then learning it. (Convenient for them as they no longer have to provide training before they start making money off of you.) "Impressive credentials" means focusing on looking good to the powers that be, rather than contributing something useful to society.

Interestingly, immigrants are 30% more likely to start a business. Perhaps the type of people who immigrate are naturally more comfortable with risk. Maybe they can't find good work elsewhere. Or maybe, some of these immigrants have not been trained to be compliant workers by our educational system.

Just a thought.






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